Ashleigh Gardner: Hi, Tyler. So before we started, could you tell me a little bit about yourself, why you chose to go into theatre, and how it’s influenced your life up until this point?

Tyler Conrady: I went into theatre in middle school — that was when I first started. I auditioned for this middle school production of Bugsy Malone. And I played “Fat Sam, the gangster.” And I was terrible. It was a whole bunch of me just screaming a lot. And then from there I was hooked. I did theatre through middle school and then I went into high school. And I just found that I felt good about it, and other people said that I was good at it. It became my hobby, sort of like sports or…bird watching or something. And theatre was my sports and/or bird-watching. (Laughs.) I’m not doing theatre as much anymore. I’m getting away from theatre a little bit, but I still owe theatre for giving me a bridge into the different mediums that I’m experimenting with currently.

AG: So you’re a playwright, but you also produce and act in a lot of your own material. Can you tell me a little bit — as much as you can without revealing anything forthcoming — about the past projects that you’ve worked on and your current projects?

TC: I’ve been writing since I was 6. In my senior year [of high school], I wrote, and actually finished, my first play. It’s about these three kids that accidentally kill one of their friends and bury him in the desert — because this takes place in Nevada, in Las Vegas — and the play takes place afterwards when they’re all being interrogated simultaneously, and the ghost of their dead friend is kind of wandering around aimlessly not realizing that he’s dead.

Last year [in 2015] I wrote a show called Tommy Kool Presents Kindness Gets a Bad Rap! The idea came to me a few months prior when I was in a psychology class…not paying attention. (Laughs.) I was thinking about in high school when you had those assemblies. I remember specifically one where there was this wrestler, and he came out to do this show. There was one scene where he was talking about, like… (mimics wrestler) “There I was, at the sixth grade dance and the boys are on one side and the girls are on the other side! And I didn’t know what to do! And then all of a sudden I heard a voice talk to me!…” And then this prerecorded deep booming voice goes, “HEY. DANCE.” And then the wrestler goes, “God? Is that you?” And then these background dancers came out dressed as zombies and did a “Thriller” dance with this super muscley wrestler guy.

AG: This actually happened?

TC: This actually happened! And I remembered it while I was sitting in class! And around that time, one of the things I had been experimenting with writing was rap, and I had found that I had a knack for writing comedic rap. And if I was gonna do a show, I would want it to be like Tenacious D. When they do concerts they’re like plays, rather, with music in it. So I got that idea, and I put in an application to the lottery for the Orlando Fringe Festival, and I got in.

AG: And how was it received at the festival?

TC: It was interesting. (Laughs.) Because being that it was my first show and that I didn’t have a huge following in the Orlando community, and the fact that it was a one-man show — it wasn’t a big thing — it was received really well.  The Orlando Sentinel came out and they gave it a really good review, and they pretty harshly reviewed a lot of shows at the Fringe that year. I was really happy to receive a good review that year from them. And I got a standing ovation almost every show. It was really great.

AG: Why did you choose to start writing when you were younger, but also why did you choose to continue writing?

TC: When I started writing it was around the time I had learned to read, so I think it was this general excitement of like, “Hey, I can read! This is freakin’ tight.” So I kinda wanted to start writing my own things that I could read. Then from there I was always writing. I remember in fifth grade I was awarded the superlative “Most Likely to Become an Author,” so that was great. (Laughs.)

AG: That sounds very full of promise. Such big shoes to fill when you’re that small.

TC: (Laughs.) Yeah, when you’re ten.

AG: What’s your stance on writing a character or a story?  Should they be realistic or fantastical? Or should there be elements of both?

TC: I don’t think it’s fair to ever lump any original work into one mold or treat it as being cut and dry. That’s not how the creative medium of writing exists. Any book, any play, any song, any movie, any whatever is always gonna be completely different from anything else. It might fit into an overarching genre of tone, but apart from that, you’re always gonna find drastically different things. So characters can be totally grounded or realistic in a fantastical setting, or fantastical in a grounded setting. So I don’t have any one stance on how any one thing should be. I think it should just be a character that you feel comfortable writing. Or even working towards a character that you feel comfortable with, or that you could relate to, or that you like.

AG: What’s your process like for creating a show or a production? We could talk about Tommy Kool… if you like.

TC: Sure! It’s a really horrible process. I am the biggest procrastinator that I know. For Tommy Kool…, for instance, I had this really cool idea and I submitted for Fringe, and I got a couple of people to help me pay for the venue rental fee. I thought, “Yeah! This is exciting!” And then I kept going, “Ehhh, I got six months to write this.” I did not finish writing the script until, I think, two weeks before Fringe because I kept putting it off. A lot of the time I wouldn’t even let myself write because I would think, “If I let myself write it right now, it’s not gonna be good.”

I live comfortably in the polishing phase of writing, which is not something that you can jump right to, obviously. It was the most miserable time in my entire life, writing that show. I went through the tech rehearsals and the opening night thinking, “This is the worst thing I’ve ever done,” and then when it was well-received, I thought, “Okay, I guess I was good.” (Laughs.) So it wasn’t until after I did it for an audience that I thought, “Oh, wow. This stress actually made it all worth it.”

AG: What objective advantages would you say come from doing this kind of “do-it-yourself” theatre?

TC: It’s very, very difficult, and it’s very lonely a lot of times. It can also be very — cliché to say — very rewarding. When you do it all yourself, you can say, “Yeah! That was me! I did it all myself.” And it was just me writing it, producing it, directing it, staging it, me doing all this stuff — with occasional help from friends watching it or reading it, giving me feedback. But for the most part, everything was me, and I was doing all of this and that and this and that. It was just so tiresome stretching myself in so many different directions. But — it was really addicting. And that’s why I kind of want to go back to doing do-it-yourself stuff now in other mediums. I want to explore mediums until I find out where my “home” is.

AG: What’s the most rewarding thing for you personally about writing and producing your own material?

TC: This is a terrible answer, but…validation. I don’t mean it to be like, “Oh, just tell me how good I am.” The creative process for me is very miserable. It’s very full of doubt. It’s full of being unsure about everything. So when you finish doing something and you find out that it actually was good, it makes it all worth it. It was just very relieving knowing that people liked it. It was like, “Alright, you validated all my effort and all my work that I put into this. Thank you.”

AG: Were there every any setbacks that you encountered with any of your productions? How did end up you overcoming them?

TC: For Tommy Kool…, I was my own setback. It was a lot of me waiting until the last minute to do everything, and it was a lot of me bullying myself. If I had to give any advice to someone, it would just be to make sure you give yourself time, and don’t put everything off until the last minute. Because if I had comfortably allotted an hour a day writing or doing some sort of thing to focus on the project starting from when I had gotten into the festival, I probably would have comfortably been doing run-throughs a month or two prior to the actual show. It was literally, you know, everything at the last minute. So there was a lot of poor planning on my part.

That’s another struggle with do-it-yourself theatre. When you do theatre when someone else is in charge, you don’t have to worry about anything. You just have to listen to them say, “Go here. Do this.” So you kind of have that net to catch you, and if it all goes to hell, it’s not your fault. But when it’s yourself, if something bad happens, it’s because you let yourself down. It was a learning experience, and it was rewarding in that it turned out well — but it was a learning experience in that I know now what not to do.

AG: Definitely, and with this experience you can probably offer some advice. A lot of students and professionals in theatre kind of drift toward writing their own material for some reason or another. Can you offer any advice for someone trying this for the very first time?

TC: My favorite piece of advice that I ever heard on writing was from a favorite playwright and also one-man show playwright, Eric Bogosian. It kind of sounds like a cop-out answer, and it was so annoying when I first heard it. I saw this link that said, “Eric Bogosian gives great advice to budding writers!” And the advice was literally, “Write.” And that was it. And it is very true. If you like the process of creating something from nothing, then keep trying and keep trying and keep trying and redoing and editing and trying and starting over. When I first heard that advice — and I was annoyed at it — in high school and where I am now, they are light years away from each other. I will say that I’m not this incredible, amazing end-all, be-all playwright or author, but I am much more confident in my abilities and proud of my abilities now than I ever was back then.

AG: Wow, what a quote, though. It’s definitely paid off. Thank you so much for coming in and talking with me today.

TC: Yeah, of course. Thank you for the coffee. (Laughs.) I appreciate it.